Desert World Allegiances (13 page)

When the wind had taken the worst of the stench away, Shan slipped a tube down into the pipe trap and uncoiled the full length. Bracing himself, Shan sucked on the end of the tube, just until he could taste the foul liquid, and then he quickly pinched off the tube and spat the poison out. Pure pipe trap was more likely to kill you than satisfy any thirst. Putting the end of the tube in the water bottle, Shan loosened his hold on it and let the yellowish fluid trickle down. When the bottle was almost full, Shan pulled the tubing out and shook it to get the poison off as much as he could before he tucked it away.

“God, if it doesn’t interfere with your plans too much, do you think you could keep me from killing myself with this? I mean, I’ve had bad plans before, but this one is pretty stupid. I know you protect the simple hearted, and I’m hoping the simpleminded can slip in with that group.” Shan finished his prayer and considered the bottle in his hand. He’d heard stories of early explorers surviving this way after sandcat attacks and windstorms that separated them from their space ships. He just never thought he was going to get a chance to test such an idiotic contraption.

Attaching the tube so that it was above the level of the poison and would capture only the water that evaporated out of the juice, he taped it carefully in place. Then he taped the bottle to his good leg. If it worked, he would get small amounts of water in drops that clung to the sides of the tube. If it didn’t, he was about to poison himself to death. Of course this way, if he was going to die, he’d die happy and lethargic. Looking down the length of the valley, Shan set his sights on a distant spire of rock and started walking.

The sand pulled at his feet, and his body was stiff with injuries, but all he focused on was moving one foot in front of the other. The leg with the pipe juice felt heavy, but his other leg ached, so it was about even. The sand sloped up toward the surface, so Shan thought he was probably going to be able to reach the top of the crevasse without backtracking, but as the cliffs grew shorter and the sun rose higher, the shade clung to the sides of the rock, leaving Shan exposed.

Hour after hour, he walked slowly and sipped carefully of warm and foul-tasting water that gathered, drop by drop, in the tube that ran up his leg.

“Pretty stupid. You’d have been better taking over my title,” his father said. Shan might be drunk enough on pipe to hallucinate, but he wasn’t drunk enough not to notice that his father was a hallucination. Of course, the way his father’s center kept wavering in and out of existence, making him looking almost donut like in the middle—that was a big clue.

“I didn’t want to own land. Besides, I’m not going to be a replacement for Naite,” Shan told his father. He figured he didn’t have anything better to do than to talk to hallucinations. His father shimmered in the sun, the illusion of water washing him away so that Naite stood in his father’s place. Shan had never noticed just how much Naite looked like their father. They had the same olive tone to their skin, and the same sharp nose and imposing figure with wide shoulders.

“Like you could replace me.” Naite’s words were sharp and sarcastic, but the tone was almost friendly.

“You didn’t try to kill me, did you?” Shan asked. He wondered if confessions given through hallucinations would be valid for the council. Naite turned his head to the side and looked at him out of one eye like a buteo, one of those large birds that rode the winds for hours, looking for life on the open desert. Shaking his head at his own stupidity, Shan closed his eyes for a second, blocking out the blinding glare of the sun.

“I’m going to fall on my face if I don’t sit,” Shan whispered to no one in particular. He moved to a spot right next to the cliff and carefully sat, propping his burned leg out in front of him.

“Do you really think I’d try to kill you?” Naite asked, crouching down in front of Shan. It was annoying the way his face kept blurring into the sky along the edges.

“Don’t know. Don’t think so, but….” Shan shrugged.

“Idiot,” Naite said. He sat on the pointed top of a boulder and pulled his legs up under him.

“You hate me.”

“No I don’t. I think you’re an idiot, but that’s not the same as hating you.”

“I wasn’t nice to you when we were kids,” Shan pointed out. He wasn’t sure why he was trying to convince Naite that they hated each other, but it seemed like the right thing to do.

Naite had to think about that one for a while. “Kids aren’t nice,” he finally answered with a shrug.

“I didn’t know.” Shan closed his eyes and leaned back into the warm rock. “I promise you on my vows, I didn’t know.”

“You should have.”

Shan opened his eyes at the unfamiliar voice. Temar stood there, his arms crossed over his stomach and his blue eyes staring at Shan accusingly.

“Yep, I should have,” Shan admitted. “I never paid enough attention.”

“You didn’t want to look at me too long. You didn’t want to admit how you felt when you looked at me for too long.” The light haloed through Temar’s blond hair, and his face was almost angelic. “You’re so busy trying to not do something wrong that you didn’t do anything right. You didn’t protect me.”

Shan stared at Temar, his guts suddenly cold. “No.”

“I’m your hallucination. I couldn’t say it if you didn’t already know it was true.”

Shan reached down and pulled the pipe trap juice bottle off his leg. The liquid inside the bottle had turned a dark, urine yellow as the water evaporated out, and Shan opened the mouth of the bottle and poured it out onto the rocks. Tiny rivers and rapids and waterfalls and tributaries appeared as the juice flowed over the ground and soaked into the white sand. A yellow stain, shaped like an upside-down tree, remained.

“Doesn’t make what I said less true,” Temar pointed out.

“I need to change the pipe juice more often,” Shan answered. Of course, that wasn’t an answer, but he had grown skilled at avoidance and obfuscation over the years. He remembered those months after Naite had left the house. He’d grown very skilled.

Naite rose up out of the yellow tree stain like a pale ghost of himself. “I was a stupid kid. I shouldn’t have left you with Dad, but I really didn’t think he’d go after you. I thought I had done something to lead him on. I thought it was my fault, and that if I was out of the house, things would be better for you. God, Shan. You know this. You know that I’ve always loved you, even if I don’t know how to say it. And you still think I would kill you?” Naite looked so hurt. His face twisted in despair, and Shan reached out for him, only to have Naite’s form explode into dust and swirl away like a sand devil.

As the sand devil vanished, Temar was left standing in the sun. “If you would have just looked at me… if you would have let yourself admit that you were attracted, then maybe you would have noticed how much trouble I was in.”

Shan closed his eyes and tried to focus on his thoughts and not the sluggish desire that rolled through him. “I’m a priest. We give up attraction and marriage and children. A married man, a man who is courting someone, he is worried about this world, about his future, about making his life better, here and now. I’m supposed to worry about the next life, about people’s souls, about pleasing God.”

“So, how is that working for you? Did you save my soul? Are you avoiding thinking about the needs of this world?” Temar’s voice was suddenly bitter, but then considering how Shan had failed him, he couldn’t blame the man for a little hatred and bitterness.

“I’m still going to try and help you,” Shan said. He didn’t mean to sound defensive, but he did. Silence answered him. When Shan opened his eyes, Temar was gone. The white sand and the red-stained rock and the crystal borax jutting out all waited silently. The yellow tree stain and the hot sun mocked him, and Shan found that he couldn’t summon the energy to care.

Chapter 10

W
ALKING
through the open sands, Shan had learned to focus his mind on just one landmark, clearing everything out, so that reaching that landmark became the only goal that existed. For almost three days, his landmark had been the heavy Livre moon. The sand-sculpted mountains and valleys around him shifted and reshaped themselves, hour by hour and minute by minute, but the larger moon, pale and barely visible in the daylight, pulled him in one constant direction.

His father shadowed his steps sometimes, Naite too. The specters didn’t seem real, not like they had that first day. Now he was aware that they were figments of his imagination, and they had the odd habit of sinking into the ground or blowing away when he wasn’t paying attention to them. Naite had an annoying habit of composing the sort of impromptu ballads workers sometimes indulged in at night when they sat around and ate meals. In reality, Naite never sang, although the sarcasm in his lyrics sounded like Naite. His most constant companion, though, was Temar. The young man varied between gazing at him with wide, injured eyes and spitting hate at him. Sometimes the endless, silent accusations wore at him. Once Shan had stood in the middle of a dune and screamed at them all to leave him alone. They hadn’t, and part of him was glad. They offered an odd sort of companionship, and that was better than the solitude of the white sand.

“You should have reached the valley, Shan. I don’t like this,” Naite complained. Temar had temporarily vanished, and Shan walked in the illusion of shade that his brother’s image provided.

When he wasn’t singing about Shan’s various shortcomings, Naite complained a lot. He’d spent hours one day talking about the unfairness of the political systems in the inner worlds. Those distant planets and stations circling distant stars had made promises of land and freedom and a secure future if settlers would just come to Livre. The inner planets wanted Livre’s purified borax deposits and white sands and arsenic and, more importantly, the optic-circuit quality glass that could be made from such unusually pure forms of the basic glass ingredients. But now they were so busy killing each other that they’d forgotten all those promises. When they’d destroyed enough of each others’ jump ships that they needed huge quantities of high-quality glass for optical circuits, they’d be back. But the people who had first come to Livre might be nothing but wind-scoured skeletons in graves by then.

Of course, Shan knew that this version of Naite was an illusion, because the real Naite complained about chokeweed and rusting water lines, not political deception and the inherent immorality of war. The Naite who was walking next to him right now, complaining about how long it was taking to find the Spence Valley, that sounded more like the real Naite.

“What do you want me to do about it?” Shan asked wearily. He pulled the tube up and sucked at the warm, hallucinogenic and plastic-tasting drops of water. It was never enough to quench his thirst, and once again he eyed the pipe trap juice in the bottle. This latest batch was clearer than any he’d collected yet, and he could feel the temptation to gulp it down. His tongue felt like it was glued to the bottom of his mouth with thick slime, and his lips were cracked and painful, and the pipe juice sloshed against the sides of the plastic bottle so invitingly.

“Try it and you’ll be sorry,” Naite warned.

“You think I don’t already know that?” Shan shoved at Naite, and his hand went right through his brother’s middle, scattering his body like motes of dust in a sunbeam. One of the little sparks twirled and hovered and then sank down until it rested directly above the sand dune to his right. Shan frowned at the steady light, waiting for the hallucination to waver, but it seemed remarkably constant for a pipe-induced vision.

“Check it out,” Naite suggested.

“I can’t just start wandering the desert.”

“What do you think you’re doing now?”

Shan took a second to glare at his brother. “I am following a landmark and moving toward Spence Valley.”

“Either you’re walking slower than an old man or you already passed Spence Valley.”

“Trust me, I’m walking slower than an old man,” Shan told Naite, but he couldn’t take his eyes off that small and constant point of light.

“No rock around here. You’re going to have to bed on the sand, and sooner or later, the sandrats are going to find you.” Naite sounded almost worried about that, but since Naite was nothing but a projection of Shan’s own fears, a little terror was to be expected. Shan turned away from the light and looked up at the oversized moon that hung in Livre’s sky, hiding the smaller moon that orbited in its shadow this time of day. The blue of full day was slowly fading into the purple of evening, and the storms on the face of the moon were evident in the swirls of color barely visible.

“I’m so dead.” Shan breathed the words. Up until this moment, he hadn’t wanted to admit it, but right now, it was not looking good.

“You’re breathing a little too much to actually be dead,” Temar told him, his ghostly figure rising from the sand. Temar was fuzzy and translucent and had a tendency of getting wavy if Shan stared at him too long, but he still had that odd beauty to him that drew Shan toward him.

“You’ve been hanging out with Naite too much. You’re sounding like him,” Shan said, turning away. In real life, he’d tried so hard to not pay too much attention to the young man that he hadn’t paid nearly enough attention to him at all, and so now, given the chance to stare at him—to watch Temar’s delicate fingers play with a button and to look into that unusual shade of blue eyes—Shan felt guilty. He had no business indulging himself, especially not when the real Temar was suffering for Shan’s lack of judgment. Besides, he was distracted by that same light winking at him from the same spot on top of the same dune.